Total pages in book: 78
Estimated words: 77422 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 387(@200wpm)___ 310(@250wpm)___ 258(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 77422 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 387(@200wpm)___ 310(@250wpm)___ 258(@300wpm)
A house that I’d been hell-bent on fixing up myself—and now I wasn’t.
It wasn’t that I couldn’t physically do it. Likely, I could help with the rest of them. I just didn’t feel the drive anymore. My priorities had changed, and although I still helped with design and planning, I no longer had anything to prove to the man in front of me.
I’d proved my worth to him a hundred times over, just like he had with me.
I looked down at the ring that sat heavily on my right ring finger.
The one I’d received a few days after I’d woken up in the hospital. The one I hadn’t taken off since.
Dean and I hadn’t officially married, yet. We would do it later this year once everything was more back to normal.
When that day came, though, nothing would change. We’d be legally married, yes, but we’d still be just as devoted to each other then as we were now.
“You coming in or you going to contemplate the paint colors all day?” Dean called from somewhere in the house.
My eyes automatically went to the paint colors, ones Dean and I had chosen two weeks ago at Lowe’s, and I smiled.
“I like this paint color!” I called to him.
Dean snorted.
“You better. This house was a bitch to paint with all the trim you had me put on,” Dean muttered from somewhere in the house.
I followed the sound of Adrienne’s cries of happiness and anger, and found her and Dean in the kitchen.
Adrienne was on the floor playing with a pile of toys that’d obviously been left from the last time she’d been here with Dean, and he was studying something on the counter.
“What’s that?” I asked.
“Paper,” he muttered, sounding distracted.
I came up to his side and peered around his bicep, sucking in a breath when I saw what was on the front page.
“Hell yeah,” I muttered. “They’re considering the death penalty?”
Dean hummed in confirmation.
“Yep,” he stated.
I didn’t know how to feel about that.
On one hand, I’d suffered greatly at the hands of those two men. They deserved the death penalty, especially seeing as they didn’t just stop at Raven and I. No, they’d done it to hundreds of women before that, and had never been caught.
The other, more vindictive part of me, thought that they shouldn’t get the death penalty. Surely, there were other ways that they could suffer while in prison. The death penalty was too easy for them. They didn’t deserve easy. They didn’t deserve a quick death.
Fuck no. They deserved something so slow and debilitating that they would wonder how it could possibly get worse than it already was.
The sound of a toy being thrown across the room had both Dean and I looking over just in time to see Adrienne taking the first crawl of her young life.
Dean and I collectively sucked in a breath as we watched her move first one knee, then the other.
Her hands soon followed, and our breath left us in a rush as she crawled all the way over to her toy.
The front door banged open and Wolf appeared in the doorway to the kitchen, Nathan running around like the tiny terror that he was at his knees.
The moment Wolf got within reaching distance of Adrienne, he scooped her up and immediately said, “This day can go to hell.”
I blinked.
“Why?” I asked.
He growled in frustration.
“I’m not going to talk about it right now. I need you to watch Nathan for the night.”
“Does it have to do with a certain blonde with a tornado girl attached at her hip?” I teased Wolf about his most recent love interest.
Hannah and Wolf had been ‘not seeing each other’ for a couple of months now. Although both said it wasn’t anything serious, I wasn’t sure that it was not more than that at this point. They spent a lot of time together.
“No,” Wolf scowled. “This has nothing to do with Hannah and everything to do with Raven.”
My brows rose.
“Raven?” I asked in surprise.
He nodded, scowling.
“Yes. Raven.”
***
Dean
“I wanted to be the Chip to your Joanna,” July pouted cutely, hours later.
I smiled at her.
“You can still be the Joanna to my Chip,” I told her, referencing our favorite fixer-upper show. “You’re better at the decorating and staging than I am, anyway.”
“You should’ve seen how he wanted to decorate the last house,” Able called from across the room where he was standing on the ladder painting trim. “He wanted to go with apples. Who the fuck decorates in apples?”
“My mom decorates in apples!” I said.
“A mother and father you never see. What’s that say about them?” Bowe called from the attic where he was running an HDMI cable through the rafters.
“I saw them last month when they stopped by for a night,” I replied.
July patted my hand to comfort me, and I scowled at her.